Hey, Isn't That Internet Site Built on SharePoint?

I recently happened upon a website in my personal life that caused me to sit back and think, "Hey, I think that's SharePoint!" Granted, while it's never a surprise to encounter a SharePoint site in my professional life these days, it's considerably rarer that I unexpectedly encounter an Internet-facing SharePoint site "in the wild." (Mind you, this is not to suggest that there aren't lots of them out there, and some of the world's biggest companies are among them, I'm just saying that in my personal experience, I don't often trip across new-to-me examples.)

Anyway, having tripped across several more such sites in the span of a few weeks, I got to wondering ... is there a way to determine for sure if a given site is a SharePoint site? Viewing the source of my prime suspects and searching on "SharePoint" and "Microsoft" turned up zilch, which was admittedly disappointing, though not entirely surprising since I figured that default code could probably be overwritten or obfuscated by a talented developer.

After following that suggestion, which had been made by my colleague Jeff Kozloff, and then Googling and using some of the methods described in Nirav Sanghvi's post, How can we Identify a SharePoint Site?(including the one Jeff had initially suggested), as well as comments in response to a similar question at Footprint of IT, I was still unable to ferret out proof of SharePoint existence on any of the suspect sites. Bruised but unbroken, and still feeling certain that at least the original site that had sent me down this rabbit hole had to be SharePoint, I went back to the Google well one last time and, using a different search phrase, happened upon the stackoverflow post, Is the website Sharepoint or just .NET?, which then led me to a nifty website/tool (that's probably familiar to many developers) BuiltWith.com.

And guess what? Turns out that .PHP can be made to look a heck of a lot like SharePoint to the untrained eye. Exhibit A: http://www.stoneponystore.com/, which is the site that got me started down this line of inquiry.

Crazy, huh?

So, what are your favorite (actual) SharePoint sites that you've happened upon unexpectedly in the wild?

glenchambers
wrote
re: Hey, Isn't That Internet Site Built on SharePoint?

on Wed, Apr 4 2012 7:56 PM

Our website, www.brightstarr.com, is built on SharePoint Server 2010, however, as we use a custom framework including responsive design (the first in the world) you can't tell it is by using the builtwith.com tool. SharePoint is a very powerful tool but doesn't lend itself well to websites unless you know what you are doing. Another great resource for excellent SharePoint sites is www.topsharepoint.com/fortune-500-companies-using-sharepoint - this proves that it is fast becoming the Enterprise tool of choice for public facing websites.